That contention is heavily dependent upon how Docker was installed. Docker desktop, yes. Command line Docker on Linux? That used to be much more complicated and depended on if you had an OS vendor provided version or had a Docker provided repo install.
RHEL’s repo version always seemed particularly out of date to me.
sudo dnf copr enable rhcontainerbot/podman-next -y
sudo dnf install podman
However the versions provided by the distro have gone through more tests. We are still improving this part as ideally you should be able to pick a version
Podman has no control on this. Each Linux distribution deals with packaging in its own way. If this packaging is not to your taste, podman can easily be installed from alternatives sources: unofficial deb packages, or plain binaries.
BTW, podman v4 is in debian/experimental. I don't know why it didn't land into unstable yet.
> This isn't a problem with Docker, which has tight control over what is deployed.
AFAIK, Docker (now Moby) has no control over what is packaged in Debian/Ubuntu (unless the Debian maintainer works for Moby?). If you install Docker from the official Debian repositories, the "docker" package is an alias for "docker.io", which is a version 20.10.19 in debian/unstable. The latest 20.10.21 is not yet packaged by Debian.
Will check if we need to change the docs.
But your recommendation remains. Better to use the latest release as indicated on the GitHub releases of podman. These have seen more tests and integration use/tests
Alternatively you can run `podman machine` which sets up a VM with the stable version.